1900.] Annual Address^ 4)1 



case. Classical parallels will occur to everyone, and I am also reminded 

 of a dramatic form of oath which was used iu my own court when I 

 was Subdivisional Officer of Govindpur in Maubhum. A piece of a 

 tiger's skin was tied on to the railing of the witness box, and every 

 Santal who gave evidence took the skin in his hand and swore in his 

 own language a teri-ible oath which began by apostrophising the moon 

 and ended with an invitation to the tiger to devour him if he swore 

 falsely. I am not prepared to vouch for the efficacy of the sanction, 

 but every now and then it was apparent that a witnesses was anxious 

 to shirk holding the skin or tried to let go of it before the final 

 adjuration hiil jamdin " May the tiger eat me " had been reached. 



The Kuki and Garo ordeals are of a different and more material 

 type. Kuki disputants walk side by side into water holding their heads 

 well back until the water reaches their mouths. The man who first 

 chokes for breath loses his case. The Garos, so Captain Howell tells 

 me, dive together into a deep pool, catch hold of a rock at the bottom 

 and hold on as long as they can. Judgtnent is entered in favour of the 

 man who comes up last ; and cases are known of sturdy litigants getting 

 themselves drowned in the process but winning the suit for their kith 

 and kin beyond all possibility of appeal. The practice is a fairly 

 ancient one, and is not confined to the Garos. Three hundred years 

 ago, in 1586, Master Ralph Fitch, tlie first Englishman who visited 

 Burma, found it prevailing among the people whom he calls Pegues : 



" The Pegues if thej^ have a sute in the law which is so doubtfull 

 that they cannot well determine it, put two long canes into the water 

 where it is very deepe : and both the parties go into the water by the 

 poles, and there sit men to judge, and they both do dive under the 

 water, and he which remaineth longest under the water doth winne the 

 sute." 



To return from this digression to the proposals of the British 

 Association. The illustrations I have cited show that now and again 

 an excellent monograph may be got from some one who has special 

 knowledge of the usages of a particular tribe, while scraps of more or 

 less interesting information may be picked up by anyone with a taste 

 for such things. But we want more than this. Before all vestiges of 

 primitive custom are swept away by the action of proselytism on the 

 one side and education on the other aided, as I have elsewhere pointed 

 out,^ by the recent extension of railways, we ought to have a systematic 

 ethnographic survey of those parts of India which have not already 

 been dealt with. The cost of such a survey would not be great ; the 



1 Tribes and Castes of Bengal, Vol. i,, p. xxix. 



